The Blairs' hatred of beauty is typical of the modern millionaire

This is Wotton House in Buckinghamshire, pretty much the perfect Queen Anne house, built in 1704 by John Keene.

Perfect, that is, until the Blairs bought the south pavilion (Sir John Gielgud's old home) on one side of the house for £4m. Now they want to build a brutalist steel and glass sports pavilion in their ornamental garden next door.

The attitude is typical of the utterly unhistorical, beautyphobic approach of the modern millionaire. Faced with all that intricate beauty – that steeply hipped roof, those dormer windows, the white stone quoins on red brick, immaculate turn of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Dutch classicism – all they can answer with is the ugly, unadorned lines of a bus shelter.

It is a strange paradox. When a millionaire wants to buy a new superpad, they inevitably go for something old and grand. Something in the back of their minds convinces them that the old look is the impressive look. But as soon as they seek to add something – or change an interior – there is no knowledge of beauty or the past; all their empty imaginations can supply is emptiness, framed by glass and skeletal steel.

The house the Blairs live in is itself a pavilion to the main house – and it is a pavilion of great and subtle beauty; it shows how a small annexe can reflect and flatter the large, central element. The Blairs' pavilion to the pavilion, as it were, could have provided a further thoughtful reflection on its two bigger counterparts. Instead it just mars the whole collection of buildings.